When a visitor arrives at a large gathering like a street fair, a local celebration or a facility, and at a moment in time may want to get more information about the purpose of the gathering, the extent of the gathering, the available activities at the gathering, the help contact to reach in case of necessity or emergency; in this situation, the visitor can have multiple options:                Find the organizer's office if it exists.        Find a public information panel stand or ask people around.        When only a phone number, a hyperlink or an email address of the gathering or facility administrator is provided, the said visitor can use his mobile device (smartphone, tablet or any equivalent devices) to obtain the needed information via device's browser, phone application or email application. As the internet connection is engaged for the purpose, the visitor's mobile device must have a WiFi or broadband connection capability which is not always possible for every visitor, since the broadband connection usage may require a prepaid subscription, hence the potential cost dependency of these solutions. Also these means of communication may cause an excessive delay since the expected responses can be sometimes unpredictable or unavailable.        
On the other hand, the gathering or facility administrator may at a moment in time wants to inform all visitors or a group of visitors at a specific location about a commercial offer, an emergency situation; in pursuance of the said task, the administrator can have multiple options:                Update the urgent information on the website dedicated to the gathering or the facility, but the information is unlikely to reach visitors in real time.        Use speaker or distribute leaflets throughout the facility or the gathering area to inform the visitors.        
To reduce greatly the information access time in this scenario, there are proposed solutions from the internet-of-things technological field (named IOT thereafter). The most commonly proposed solutions use system-on-a-chip or microchip based beacon devices (also known as beacon tags) to broadcast over the air using a short distance based wireless network connection, a preprogrammed message that contains information related to services available at the location where the beacon is set up. To read the message, the visitor in this scenario, needs to use a dedicated mobile application installed on his mobile device to capture the message, process it and present the related information via a user interface on the screen of his device. As the visitor moves around the facility, he can get informed in real time whenever he enters the broadcasting area of other beacon devices that have been set up along the way; also the visitor just needs to make some finger touches to open the information of interest, instead of typing in a long hyperlink, a phone number, an email address, like it is described in the visitor's first scenario.
The information broadcast by each IOT beacon device is either preprogrammed or originated from the microchip itself, but cannot be a relayed information from a third party device due to the inherent limitation of the beacon devices' microchip system; as a result, the administrator of the gathering or facility cannot use these beacon devices to broadcast real time information when needed, and has to resort to the manual way instead.
Moreover the IOT beacon devices which are set up throughout the gathering or facility can belong to different service providers, therefore can work only with their owners' mobile applications; consequently each visitor will need to install as many mobile applications as information he needs to view, hence the potential complexity of the current standalone IOT solutions.
In conclusion, most of the currently proposed standalone IOT solutions have simplified people's lives indeed, but one can point out that there are still some potential problems that remain to be solved: inadequacy, complexity, cost dependency, excessive delay for getting information in real time in an ad hoc environment, that are caused by the use of hyperlink, phone call, email and location oriented microchip based beacon devices.